Fixing talent point juggling

[minmay]

I normally try to stay out of this game's design, but there's something that just annoys me too much. It is talent point juggling.
The last 4 class talent points and the last 3 generic talent points, as you know, may be unlearned. Unfortunately, this allows you to use any active talent at level 5 (or level 4, if it's a generic), and even some sustained talents, without actually investing the points into it!

Here's my proposal. Make it so that only talents at level 1 are unlearnable. This still allows new players to try out a new talent without committing to it - if you put one point in Thunderstorm, try using it, then realize that it makes you Hurricane yourself, you can take that point out.
But if you try to juggle points, you will have to entirely unlearn one talent - making it unavailable - and if you put the point on a talent that already has points in it, you won't be able to get that point back. So the only sustainable juggling would be between level 1 talents - but every time you do so, both talents will be placed on cooldown, making it nearly useless in combat.

There would remain a few isolated cases, mainly with passives: you could still juggle between combat accuracy and weapon masteries, but only in a very limited way. Most characters that want a weapon mastery want more than one level in it, so this is probably not a significant problem.

[Zonk]

I can see how this is a bit of an issue, yes.
What I'd really like as a fix would be if we could get a good enough AI to let NPC(with 'tactical' ai) respec, can you imagine that? It would be extra difficulty but of the 'fair' kind which I approve.

[Davion Fuxa]

I sort of understand the premise for this idea, but one problem I see is that you need to invest several points into some skills before learning the true beauty behind them.

[Doctornull]

The issue is re-assigning your points in the middle of a fight, right? Optimizing for THAT SPECIFIC FOE and then re-assigning when he's dead?

There's two contributing factors here:
1/ The number of points which can be re-assigned (currently 4); and
2/ The times when those points can be re-assigned (currently "any time").

Would it be possible to limit #2?

[Crim, The Red Thunder]

Only reassign once per 20 turns? Only reassign when no talents are on cooldown? Either of those are more then enough, (the former works for anything bar really weird talents like imbue or teleport angolwen, that have significantly long cooldowns.) and that would stop the meta-gaming, without penalizing those who want to try a talent at higher levels, before deciding if it's worth keeping.

[minmay]

Requiring that all talents be off cooldown and that all sustains be off would mostly work, I suppose. However, I don't particularly want to have to manually deactivate and reactivate all my sustains every time I level up.
I also consider it highly undesirable that you can put "temporary" points in talents (like many characters do for combat accuracy), but I seem to be in the minority here.

[Crim, The Red Thunder]

I see no reason to require sustains be turned off. That wouldn't make an issue. As for temporary points, some builds almost require it. (Archmage without fire or lightning, for instance. Doing abashed without them is impossible, but the points can be better spent elsewhere if you're heading towards Aether, as soon as manathrust is up and running.)

I don't see the point in accuracy being a juggle. You want accuracy, for stuns if nothing else, on the melee classes. You max that as points allow, and don't waste time juggling. What would you do, juggle points into it before every attack?

I also point out that removing and rearranging your 'floating' is what makes certain very fun gimmick builds possible (Staffzerker, psiblade rogue, a few others...). I'd certainly hate to lose the fun these odd sidegrade builds can bring. Getting a psiblade rogue up and running without juggling some points in dagger mastery until you can afford psiblades, is a bit of an issue. Might be doable, but not even close to effective.

I do however, wholly endorse the idea of preventing the '5 point juggle' that people use to put 1 point in every talent, and then juggle 4 around so every talent they use is always at 5, before juggling to something else. That's just absurd meta-gaming that breaks the system away from the experimentation and gimmick builds it was meant to allow, into actual abuse.

[SageAcrin]

Temporary Combat Accuracy is more of a symptom of Combat Accuracy being a very binary(need it or don't) melee fighter tax; If the talent did something more to improve your character, it wouldn't happen.

I personally (have always) liked the idea of having any talent you juggle get a short cooldown(1 CD would be enough for the most part).

But as of right now, the hugely nasty earlygame scale on Nightmare(and presumably this is only worse on higher difficulties) kinda encourages swapping to the point of being a feature and not an issue, entirely. Feels like Nightmare and up need tweaks to really accommodate any changes. 1 CD would actually make that still possible in an interesting way, thinking on it...that probably would work still. But any more extreme changes would cause damage to the unstable higher difficulties.

[minmay]

I see no reason to require sustains be turned off. That wouldn't make an issue.

It actually would, because of talents like Retribution. You can activate it at level 5, then pull off 4 points and it will behave as if it were level 5 except for the explosion radius.

Of course, even without talent point juggling you can still juggle spellpower items to get a better Retribution, so what really needs to be done is get rid of talents like that. The game is already most of the way there (mindslayer shields/auras/conduit, despite giving a warning about it, react appropriately to stat/talent changes without reactivation), but there are still stragglers like Retribution and Last Stand.

[Doctornull]

Other possible solutions:

1/ Only re-assign points when you're on the World Map.

2/ Only re-assign points at level-up.

3/ Pay a trainer in town 50 gp and re-assign any number of points anywhere.

[Crim, The Red Thunder]

Total respec would wreck balance completely. Definitely against that. (Even if it would open up all KINDS of bizarre builds)

Don't like 'only on levelup', since that's often when you dump a bunch of points in a talent to see what it'll work out as, though worldmap might be feasible, sort of. I still think just limiting how often it can be done works better then restricting where/how many times.

As for sustains, they turn off and on, automatically, whenever you change any talent/stat. Last I heard, this was not an issue... Is the game log lying about them resetting to new talent levels when they turn off and on?

[minmay]

As for sustains, they turn off and on, automatically, whenever you change any talent/stat. Last I heard, this was not an issue... Is the game log lying about them resetting to new talent levels when they turn off and on?

Most sustains do. Some don't. I gave eight examples in my last post. If you want a complete list, grep for no_sustain_autoreset.
(And sustains don't seem to reset when you change stats/mastery by means outside the talent screen. This is a huge problem on its own - all the sustained talents using addTemporaryValue that scale off anything other than raw talent level are actually broken.)

[Crim, The Red Thunder]

Then the autoreset definitely needs to be added to these other talents. Absence of that would seem to be an issue indeed. I was not aware that autoreset wasn't on all sustains.

[Doctornull]

Total respec would wreck balance completely. Definitely against that. (Even if it would open up all KINDS of bizarre builds)

Could you give me an example or two of this wrecked balance?

Maybe it's because I'm lazy, but I probably wouldn't re-spec my talents because I'd already have gear to support them... unless my choices were so bad and un-synergistic that keeping on would be pointless, in which case it's not really "wrecked balance" so much as "well damn, time to start over".

But maybe that's just me... what would you do with the ability to totally re-spec, that wrecks balance?

[Frumple]

It'd make arcane blades a lot easier, just as an example. Go caster for the early/mid game (AB walks through to dreadfell pretty much asleep when ranged focused), then flat transition into melee damage monster (which gives a fair showing of walking through the late mid to end game). Think there's a few other classes that can do stuff like that, as well... mindslayer melee trivializes the earlier parts of the game, ferex, but focus slayers apparently start wrecking things shortly thereafter. Full respec would mean you can just... build for that part of the game, entirely, and then flat transition into stuff that gives more bang for buck later on. It'd have good odds of just trivializing swathes of the game... it already does that to a limited extent, for some classes.

AB's that good example, t'me. 4/5 flame will wipe the first several dungeons clean with basically no effort (on normal difficulty, anyway), and after that you can transition into stone for melee murder par excellent, as flame's damage starts leveling out. Being able to just go 5/5 flame and pick up some other ranged stuff? Limited beamspam build, ala an archmage with less sustain but more spellpower and coast through the early/mid game? It'd change things up a notable amount, I'd say.

E: Dunno if it's worth noting, but ABs and rogues are actually the only class I recall I've ever bothered juggling points around on.